


aching planet

by Official_Biscuit_Moron



Category: Gintama
Genre: Angst, Gen, Minor Character Death, Yorozuya Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-08-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:28:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25759597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Official_Biscuit_Moron/pseuds/Official_Biscuit_Moron
Summary: Didn’t someone tell her once that the more bones break, the stronger they get? A nugget of Gin-chan’s wisdom, or Anego’s maybe? It rings oddly in her mind, sounding like something Kamui would say, dark and violent and through his bloody teeth.She pictures them white and clean again and sets down the flowers with a soft hand, her shadow fluttering against the rough stone.
Relationships: Kagura & Kouka, Kagura & Sadaharu, Kagura & Sakata Gintoki & Shimura Shinpachi
Comments: 10
Kudos: 28





	aching planet

Kagura’s bones do not break easily. She’d like to think her heart doesn’t either — a Yato’s strength, through and through, pumping through her veins. But her heart would be strong even if it weren’t for her blood, because it is hers, and also because it has been fractured so many times before. Didn’t someone tell her once that the more bones break, the stronger they get? A nugget of Gin-chan’s wisdom, or Anego’s, maybe? It rings oddly in her mind, sounding like something Kamui would say, dark and violent and through his bloody teeth. 

She pictures them white and clean again and sets down the flowers with a soft hand, her shadow fluttering against the rough stone.

Sadaharu No. 1 is a sprightly little thing — she likes him for the way he hops, bouncy and jerky, likes him for his soft fur and his dark, bright eyes, not dimmed by the endless rain and cloudy days. He’s an old rabbit, but she likes that, too, because he’s still alive. It kindles a tentative hope in her small chest.

Her mother laughs when Kagura brings him inside for the first time and she has to run around and catch him to stop him from knocking over the feeble flowers by her bed. He sits relatively peacefully on Kouka’s stomach, after that, and Kagura watches with hesitant wonder as Kouka chuckles at Sadaharu’s jumpiness, a light red flush falling over her cheeks from the exertion of laughing. Sadaharu blends seamlessly into her white sheets and white hands. Kagura reaches out her own hand to stroke his fur, deliberately gentle, and smiles at her mother, the world falling away from the corners of her mind.

She wakes in the morning with Sadaharu clutched too tightly in her arms. Blue eyes and polite smiles and retreating backs, hands larger than her own spin circles in her mind, blood and rain, splashing, mixing on grey hard ground, dull colors, clutching at black fabric, black hair, futility, and her heart drums out a ruthless beat but she ignores it in favor of releasing Sadaharu from her grasp.

He’s cold and limp, and though she shakes and shakes him, his eyes never regain their light. She shakes him more, wonders, after every shudder and jerk, if he’s moving again, turns him over and presses her small hand to his small chest. She wishes she could pretend that the pounding of the rain is inside his heart, pumping his blood, but there is no pulse of life underneath her fingers and Sadaharu only moves when she moves him. Kagura looks at her hands and wonders at how completely they render her powerless.

She doesn’t tell Kouka. Her eyes are red and sore, redder than her hair, than her shirt; she wipes them on it then waits till the water stains fade to nothingness. Sadaharu is buried quietly beneath the dirt around their house, quietly beneath the hammering of the rain on her back and her face. Her hands stir the dirt into useless, sticky mud that slops over Sadaharu and stains his fur the same dismal color as the rest of the planet. 

(She paints him with it anyway, until he’s out of sight.)

Covered in mud and dripping with water, she washes her hands until they’re red, flushed, and fills up a pot at the sink. Her fingers are clumsy and slow. Kouka asks, when she brings her a bowl of white rice, what she’s been doing out in the stormy weather. Kagura waits patiently for her to stop coughing, rubs her back and pretends not to notice the red of the blood she hides in her thin hands. “I was just enjoying the rain, Mami,” she says, smiles politely, and helps her eat her breakfast.

Her mother’s hair is silky, dull, her skin pale and waxen, everything colored in sepia tones like a photograph of something from the past. She looks like porcelain, fragile instead of unbreakable as Kagura knows her to be, like Kagura’s memories of her kind older brother and attentive father, like the dusty pictures falling from the wall, like the jar of flowers scattered across the floor in a mixture of pale withered petals and glass.

She dies so quietly that Kagura doesn't see the moment that it happens. One moment holding her cold, limp hand, trying to stop herself from squeezing it too hard, another just the same, only when she looks back, Kouka’s eyes are blank and smooth, cloudy, like the sky outside. The bed is soft but her warmth is absent. Kagura gently slips her hand out of her mother’s, draws her knees to her chest and presses her face into them, the rain pounding over any sound she might make. It weeps through the ceiling and howls at the walls and claws desperately at the door and she is alone, alone.

(The metal of the ship is freezing against her fingertips and the ache of space is freezing against her back. She flexes her hands and holds on with all her might, grasping, clutching, blasting away from the fragile grey earth and rainy skies of her home planet, her world falling away into the void.)

Earth is a bright place with bright people, where the red of her hair and her clothes and the light in her eyes do not fade to grey. She meets Sadaharu again, and he is infinitely larger than she is, a steady, snowy boulder with strong limbs and a sturdy body and sharp teeth and fluffy white fur — Gin-chan’s hair, too, is white and fluffy, with eyes soft and dark and red, standing out starkly against the rest of him. 

(He smiles in a way that isn’t really polite at all, and Kagura likes him for it.) 

His and Sadaharu’s coloring reminds her of Sadaharu No.1, of flowers teetering in a cracked jar and her mother’s gentle, warm amusement. She holds them — and that weird, silly-looking glasses monster — close, with a violent tenderness. 

They do not break.

**Author's Note:**

> this was heavily inspired by big thief's song 'mary,' it's very pretty and it maketh me cry
> 
> (also, i felt like the pacing of this was a little bit too fast, and there wasn't enough variety in the sentences, please tell me if there's anything i can improve on!)
> 
> (hi, hi, i'm putting different petitions on all my fics, here's another petition to support blm: http://chng.it/b9nPgzRLys)


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